Battelle expands studies to opioids

After nearly 50 years of tobacco research, Battelle announced on Tuesday that it will start studying the effects of other substances, including opioids and marijuana.

Given the rise in states legalizing marijuana and Ohio’s growing opioid epidemic, the new Battelle Public Health Center for Substance Use Research plans to use science and technology to examine the effects of these substances on users, as well as examine potential trends and usage patterns in different

demographics and communities, said T.R. Massey, a Battelle spokesman.

“As concerns grow about opioids, marijuana becomes readily more available and new tobacco products like e-cigarettes gain traction, we realized that there are critical public health questions to answer,” Joe Berger, Battelle’s general manager of health and consumer solutions, said in a news release.

The research that Battelle will conduct can be put into three main categories:

There is grant-funded research that will inform policy development at state and local levels, an area that Massey said is especially important right now.

“Scientific research has not been done on it and policy is being developed as we speak,” he said.

The second is research funded by government and private institutions, such as universities, that might include, for example, the behavioral effects of marijuana on college campuses.

The third area of research will focus on screening, intervention and referral programs to evaluate their effectiveness in treating patients.

Battelle hired Scott Novak, a former program director on prescription drug abuse with RTI’s Behavioral Health Epidemiology Program, an international nonprofit research institute, to lead the opioid research.

Erica Peters, a principal research scientist with Battelle, will lead the research on marijuana.

Peters said one area she wants to look into is the effects of marijuana when mixed with other substances, such as tobacco or alcohol.

“We’re really trying to find out the balance of risk and benefits of marijuana use,” Peters said.

Battelle’s tobacco research has included a broad number of studies, including comparing the risk of conventional and emerging tobacco products and learning more about dependence and withdrawal effects in nicotine users.

Massey said as Battelle takes a bigger step into the health-care industry, researchers will rely on the knowledge it’s gained from its years of tobacco research and apply it to this new and growing field.

“People have had opioid addictions, maybe not like today, and people have smoked marijuana, in the past,” he said. “But people had not studied it with much intensity. It’s basically a brand-new field of study.”